Navigate is the final big phase of OPTICS that will give us the crucial pieces used to tie the other areas together to improve the overall customer experience. This team is working hard to ensure a successful go-live in the coming months.

With the final OPTICS systems set to go live soon, there has been a lot of activity with the project's Core Team, as well as with other employees throughout Greenville Utilities. Most of the action recently included final testing of the system and training preparation.

The project team, along with other employees, began the final round of testing (called UAT for User Acceptance Test). Once this round of testing is over, final adjustments will be made in preparation for "go live."

The Core Team also has been hard at work preparing for the training that many of us will attend in the coming weeks. For the past couple of months, their work in this area involved preparing training materials.

In addition, several team members have been visiting with employees throughout GUC since last September, giving a brief "show and tell" of some of the new tools. This was done in an effort to better prepare employees for training.

Customer Communications

GUC has been releasing new systems from the OPTICS project since June 2013. However, the upcoming Navigate "go-live" will be the first time we have launched tools that directly impact our customers. To this end, the Public Information Office is working with the Core Team on building communication messages for our customers before, during, and after go-live. In fact, we've been communicating with some of our customers about some of the new tools since January of 2015.

After go-live, all of our customers will receive improved customer service in a variety of ways (see sidebar for some examples). Due to the nature of our business, we have different groups of customers such as commercial, residential, E-Bill, Budget Bill, and Auto-Draft, just to name a few. It's important that we communicate the right information to each type of customer to ensure a smooth transition for everyone.

Coming Up

It's been a very busy few months, with much more to come. We encourage you to keep an eye out for more frequent communications about upcoming training, requests from the Core Team, and any other information vital to the project's success.